


This is the world we made

by winter_hiems



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020), X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men Legacy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic David Haller, Blind Character, Canon Autistic Character, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Jewish Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Charles Is a Darling, Charles is a BAMF, Don't copy to another site, Dreams and Nightmares, Erik is Crushing Harder than a 12-year Old Girl, Established Relationship, F/M, Immortality, Immortals, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light Angst, M/M, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, Moira is a BAMF, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Precognition, Team as Family, Teamwork, Telepathy, Worldbuilding, canon blind character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25764238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_hiems/pseuds/winter_hiems
Summary: Charles, Erik, Moira, and Logan: four centuries-old immortals. They’ve spent their lives trying to make the world a better place, but it seems that things are only getting worse.When their abilities are exposed, they must fight to keep their freedom while tracking down a new immortal.(An X-Men Old Guard AU)
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Ruth Aldine/David Haller
Comments: 15
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

The woman walked slowly but steadily. She’d get where she was going, and she had plenty of time. The sun beat down on her red hair, which was cut practically short. Everything about her was practical: practical boots, practical jeans, a plain grey t-shirt, a practical rucksack holding everything she might need. 

When was the last time she’d been in Morocco? She might be able to remember, if she focused, but there was no point in reminiscing right now, so she didn’t bother, and kept walking. 

The man was on a motorbike. It roared underneath him, reassuring, a beast under control. In a concession to the day’s heat he had gone without his customary leather jacket, wearing a plaid shirt open over his t-shirt instead. He didn’t bother with a helmet. He didn’t need one. All he needed was sunglasses to keep the glare out of his eyes. 

He pulled up next to the woman in an alleyway. They took a moment to look at each other, then he smiled, and she smiled back. 

“You okay?” he asked, verbose as always. 

“Yeah.” 

“Travel much?” 

“Yes. And I bought you something.” She pulled a small package out of her bag and handed it to him as they walked further down the alley. 

He grinned as he examined his gift. “Cuban cigars. Damn, Moira you know me too well.” He stowed them in his own bag, a battered canvas holdall that was slung over one shoulder as if it weighed nothing. 

She shrugged, then turned serious. “Why did you ask me here, Logan?” 

“Remember Surabaya? CIA gave us the job eight years back?” 

“Yes.” 

“The guy we worked with back then, you know, Hank McCoy? He’s turned freelance and he’s got a job for us. Hostages in south Sudan.” 

Moira shook her head immediately. “We don’t do repeats, Logan. You know it’s too much of a risk.” 

“Yeah,” he said softly, but Moira doubted that she’d heard the last of it. 

“Where are Charles and Erik?” 

“They found us a hotel.” 

The hotel was typical of the places they stayed in: just run-down enough that they didn’t use security cameras, but classy enough that the rooms were clean. They booked in with their usual care, steering clear of tourists and their cameras, then made their way up to their rooms. 

The man who opened the door had brown hair and sky-blue eyes. His shirt was pale blue and the top few buttons were undone. It was a running joke among the team that Charles always felt the cold, but even he was warm today. He smiled one of his friendly, welcoming smiles, and then he and Moira were hugging. She took a moment to enjoy the embrace of her best friend in the whole world before pulling back and taking a look at him. The same as always. Like the rest of the members of her team, he looked just the same as always: not a day over the thirty-five he’d been the first time he died. Charles’ youngish looks sometimes led people to believe that he was soft. Moira knew better. She’d seen him in action; he was as tough as the others. 

Moira patted his shoulder affectionately, and then Erik was hugging her too. He was a little less overt in his displays of affection, but it seemed that she’d been away long enough for him to miss her. 

The comfort of friends. As much as she’d needed some time alone, it was good to be back with her people. 

Logan closed the door behind her, shutting out any potential prying eyes. 

“Moira, you look great.” Charles told her. 

“You don’t look too shabby yourself,” she replied. Once upon a time she’d had a Scottish accent, but since then it had faded, leaving her with a voice that was coolly international. 

“Oh, admit it, you missed us.” 

“You’re damn right I did.” 

Charles poured the tea – Earl Grey, it was always Earl Grey with Charles – and Logan poured a shot from a hip flask into his cup, not bothering to hide it from the rest of the team. He took a long sip. 

“So,” said Logan, “The job.” 

“It would mean doing some good,” said Charles. 

Moira felt suddenly uncomfortable, so she stood and walked to the window. “Would it? I look at the news every day… I’m going to assume that everyone here knows enough about the state of the world to know that it isn’t good. We’re not doing enough to help.” 

“This is what we do,” said Charles, “I know you needed a break, but this is what we agreed we do.” 

Moira turned around long enough to see Logan and Erik nod. 

“Okay,” she said, “We’ll talk to him. See if what he says is worth listening to.” 

*

It had rained earlier that day, leaving the streets slick and the air damp. Moira and Logan took a circuitous route to the meeting place – a café – knowing that when they got there, Erik would be watching them through a sniper scope, and Charles would be listening in telepathically. 

Hank McCoy had glasses and brown hair and looked over-eager. He’d aged since they last saw him, but not very much. 

“McCoy,” said Logan gruffly. 

McCoy stood and shook hands with Logan and then Moira. “Good to meet you,” he told her. 

After they had sat, Moira got to a more substantial subject matter. “So why did you leave the CIA?” 

McCoy shrugged. “I wanted a break. I might go back someday, but for now I’m doing pro-bono human rights stuff, you know.” He turned to Logan. “Wow, you have not aged a day.” 

“Oh, believe me, I have.” Logan looked like he could have been anywhere from his late thirties to his early fifties. He’d looked like that since he fought for the Union at Gettysburg. 

The small talk was over. Hank slid a newspaper over to them. “Sudan. Local time yesterday afternoon, a school bus was attacked as it left the campus. They shot the driver and the supervising teacher and abducted seventeen of the kids. The oldest student was thirteen and the youngest was eight. The government asked the US for help, but, well, they’re not considered strategically important allies right now. Me and some of my ex-colleagues felt different. They asked me to help, and now I’m asking you to help. I had a drone fly over. Thermal imaging told me everything I needed to know about the people onsite.” At this, McCoy handed Moira a stack of papers; maps, birds-eye-views of the compound where the girls were being kept. “They haven’t brought in any food or water, so they’re probably being moved soon. And once they’re moved…” 

“They’d be almost impossible to find,” Moira finished. 

“Exactly,” said McCoy eagerly. “If those girls are going to be saved, they need the best people going in to rescue them. And your team’s the best I’ve ever seen. Trust me, money is not an object here. Name the price and I’ll pay.” 

Moira nodded. The deal was done. 

*

The helicopter flew over parched dirt and sparse areas of green. Trees clung to the banks of narrow streams. 

Nobody talked. There was no need for conversation. 

Moira occupied herself by looking out of the window, her double-bladed axe slung over one shoulder. 

Logan moulded plastic explosive into small bricks on his lap. 

Charles had his head down, eyes closed; perhaps meditating, perhaps merely resting his eyes. The longsword at his hip was lovingly cared for, the leather grip replaced whenever it wore out. Erik had made it for him centuries ago, and he’d carried it ever since. It wasn’t his only weapon. His rifle was clasped in his hands. 

Beside him, Erik sat silently. He had a short spear over one shoulder, but he only ever took it out as a last resort in a fight. Before the spear came out, he would use his daggers. Inscribed with the German words for ‘blood and honour’, he’d taken them from a pair of SS officers in nineteen forty-four when the team had helped a hundred Jewish and Romani prisoners escape from train cars that had been headed to Auchwitz. Spoils of war. 

The pilot held up three fingers, and the four in the back acknowledged it with nods, looking at each other to see that they had all seen and understood. Moira shifted in her seat a little, looking out at the dusty landscape below. 

The second that the helicopter touched down they were out of it, walking calmly away, not looking back even as the wind from the rotor blades whipped up their hair. 

Then the helicopter was gone. As one, they turned in the direction they would be walking in for the next several hours, instinctively falling into line as they’d done a hundred times before. 

The sun beat down. Nobody complained. The trail was uneven. Nobody said a word. 

They passed a family group – a mother, her sister, her daughter – carrying large plastic containers in their arms and on their heads, on their daily walk to collect water from a nearby river. Charles, ever the diplomat, murmured “Peace be with you,” in their language, and the adults relaxed slightly. These four heavily armed strangers were not after them. 

By the time they reached the compound it was night, a full moon shining down bright and clear. 

It was time to get to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was inspired to write this fic after I read a short X-Men Old Guard AU by Gerec. And by that I mean I read the fic, descended into a haze of writing, and finished this in two days.
> 
> In terms of comparing Old Guard characters to X-Men characters, we have:
> 
> Andy – Moira. Given the way things went for Moira in House of X and Powers of X, I think she fits the role of ‘tired immortal’ rather well.  
> Booker – Logan. If anyone does ‘depressed immortal’, it’s Logan.  
> Joe – Erik  
> Nicky – Charles, because who else could I cast as immortal bisexual lovers?  
> Copley – Hank
> 
> The title is taken from the song ‘The World We’ve Made’, which features in the Old Guard soundtrack.
> 
> Comments and kudos are always welcome <3
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own the characters. I am not making money from this.


	2. Chapter 2

The compound was typical of its kind; a group of low buildings, some made of old shipping containers and others of mud brick. The only structure over one story high was the watchtower, where two men stood patrolling with the aid of a bright light that they turned this way and that. 

A single silenced shot, passing through the first guard’s head and into the second one’s skull. Both men fell as one. 

Half a mile away, Charles ejected the cartridge from his sniper rifle, catching the bullet casing before it fell. 

Erik had sensed the bullet’s path, had felt the metal in the guards’ clothes fall to the ground, and he nodded at Moira, who stood. The others stood around her. Moira carried a silenced pistol, but the others opted for machine guns and shotguns. 

They made their way unseen to the fence, where Logan brought out his claws. Originally made of bone, Erik had coated them with metal in the early nineteen twenties. Razor sharp, they sliced through the link fence with barely a sound. 

All was silence as they entered the compound, creeping through the narrow alleyways between the buildings, taking the place in. 

Two guards were walking in the narrow gap between two buildings. Charles sensed their minds and paused. Next to him, Erik pushed against the Earth’s magnetic field, rose into the air, and touched down behind the guards. 

Slivers of metal flew from his pockets, slashing throats and piercing hearts, the guards fell without a sound, and Erik paused only long enough to wipe the metal shards clean on the dead men’s clothes before he and Charles were running silently to the end of the alleyway, guns in hand. 

Elsewhere, two silenced shots from Moira’s pistol killed two guards in quick succession, Logan following just behind her. 

The four of them converged outside the building where the girls were being kept. Outside, there was a pile of children’s shoes. 

Logan placed the explosive against the door, while the other three stood around it keeping watch. 

“Minds?” asked Moira softly. 

“Yes,” said Charles, “But there’s something odd about them. I can sense their minds but I can’t read them.” 

“Maybe they’ve been drugged,” suggested Logan. 

“Maybe,” Charles agreed, “But they’ll be harder to keep calm if I can’t properly get into their heads. Harder to communicate with, too.” 

The explosives placed, the four of them kept close to the wall, a safe distance from the door. It blew out relatively quietly, and seconds later the four of them were inside, flashlights screwed to the tops of their guns. They descended a staircase. 

At the bottom, Moira breathed, “What…” 

This was not a room where hostages were being kept. 

The floor, the walls, even the ceiling was sterile plastic sheeting. 

Which was when the lights came on. Blinding white lights shining directly into their faces. The lights also illuminated alcoves along the walls. Erik had long enough to say, “Fuc–” before the shooting started. 

Their opponents didn’t bother with silencers. The machine guns were huge and heavy-duty. The shooters aimed mainly for the chest, bullets ripping through lungs and ribs and hearts. Erik took a stray shot to the head. Charles closed his eyes as he fell, silently accepting. 

The bullets jerked the bodies of the four who had come to rescue children and had found only mercenaries before they crumpled, quite utterly dead. 

The men stopped shooting. Empty magazines were ejected. They breathed easy; tonight’s work had not been difficult by any means. One man walked forward, took a closer look at the corpses. None moved. None breathed. “Room clear,” he told his fellows. 

They relaxed. They’d been told to expect heavy resistance, that one of the men they’d be facing was a telepath, but their telepathy-blocking headsets had worked, and now the job was done. 

Guns were lowered. The men walked away from the corpses, many turning their backs on the sight. This was a mistake. 

Nobody was looking close enough to see the hole in Moira’s cheek close up, to watch her blink and start to breathe. 

Charles’ skull. Logan’s jaw. 

Bullets popped out of bodies, and those bodies began to move, making quiet noises of pain and protest. Erik took a firmer grip on his gun and looked up at the men who’d murdered him, mingling casually with each other and chatting. 

Slowly, the four got their feet. Charles and Erik looked at each other, checking, confirming. 

The hired guns began to notice. Someone murmured, “Sweet Jesus…” 

The four started with guns and fists. Moira came forward like someone who’d seen this all before and knew exactly how it would play out, hitting hard but wasting no energy at all. Charles and Erik stuck together, shooting in tandem, one shot, one kill. Logan switched between shooting and using the gun to slam his opponents in the face. 

But they only used guns to warm up. 

Charles’ sword slid free of its scabbard with a whisper, three feet of steel in the hands of a man who’d been fighting with it for nearly a thousand years. Erik’s daggers spun in his hands, slivers of steel whirling about him. He used the metal shards to kill from a distance, and the knives for up-close-and-personal. Erik was an expert in up-close-and-personal. 

A man approached Erik from behind, and Charles shot him in the shoulder with his left hand, before his sword came down in his right and nearly cut the man in half. 

Logan shot out one of the lights, distracting his opponents with the half-light. He punched the man next to him, spun away, discarded his gun, and then the claws were out. 

Moira took advantage of the sudden light change to bring out her axe. She held it in both hands, spinning and turning, never still, every movement with its purpose. Five men fell before her and the fight was over, the only sounds the breathing of four people who’d been corpses two minutes ago. 

“Everyone okay?” asked Moira. 

“Yeah,” said Logan. 

“I’m fine,” said Charles. “Erik?” 

Erik spat out a bullet. “Alive. And angry. Where the fuck did they get plastic guns and plastic bullets?” 

“There aren’t any other minds in the vicinity,” said Charles, “The girls aren’t here. The minds I felt were only these men in suppression headsets.” He paused, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice. “But the other guards, the ones outside, they weren’t wearing headsets… And how the fuck did they even know I’m a telepath? We didn’t tell McCoy that.” 

Erik pointed to a camera in each corner of the room. “Wires heading out of here and up to who-knows-where.” 

“This was a set-up,” said Moira, trying to stay calm and succeeding, for now. “The girls were never here. They never existed.” 

Her axe took out one of the cameras, and Erik’s metal shards took care of the others. 

On a different continent, Hank McCoy looked down at his computer screen. He played the video again, watched the four fall and then rise up. 

He took out his phone and made a call. 

*

In the morning light they buried their bloodied clothing. The whole team was subdued, worried, and quietly angry. 

“Well,” said Erik, “At least McCoy had decent attention to detail. Those shoes…” 

Everyone present could guess the direction in which Erik’s thoughts were running. They’d seen similar piles in World War Two, piles of shoes from Jewish children that they’d been forced to remove before they were loaded into gas chambers. 

“We should never have done this,” said Moira sitting in the dust. “No repeats. We should have stuck to the rule.” 

“Moira, we did it for a good reason,” consoled Charles. 

“And why does that matter?” Moira cried. “We’ve done nothing, achieved nothing. We decided that we wanted to make the world better, but it’s not happening, the world is getting worse!” 

Logan sighed. “I checked everything McCoy sent us. It all seemed legit.” 

“They know what we are,” Moira muttered. “They know what we are, and they know all our faces. Some of our aliases too, probably.” She paused. “We need to find McCoy and finish this.” 

“And then?” asked Logan. 

“Then nothing,” said Moira. “I’ve lived too much of my life trying to make the world a better place and getting nowhere. So then, nothing.” 

She stood, and the others followed her lead, heading off into the bright morning. 

*

**_Texas_**

Ruth had felt restless that morning, so after breakfast she’d pulled on her trainers and a pair of dark sunglasses and gone for a walk. 

It probably hadn’t been a good idea. There was a pressure in her head like a storm about to break. She’d be having a vision soon, the future coming to her in flashes and whirls. If it was a bad one she might collapse, might even start weeping blood from the place where she didn’t have eyes. The last thing she needed was to draw attention to herself like that. 

So no, the walk had definitely been a bad idea, but she really needed to get out of the house. She walked around the suburbs for a while, heading nowhere and meeting no-one. It was early enough in the morning that the streets were quiet. 

Her restlessness mostly walked-out, she returned home, waved a hand, telekinetically unlocking the door. She never bothered with house keys. 

As she stepped onto the mat she saw that the post had come. She picked up the letters, flicked through them. A couple of bullshit advertisements and a bank statement. Nothing even remotely exciting. She turned to set them on the table by the door when she froze. 

There was someone in her house. There was a horrifically familiar mind in her house. 

It couldn’t be, he couldn’t be here, _how was he here?_

She reached out, tried to suppress his mind, tried to make him pass out, but panic made her clumsy and then he was behind her. 

“Hello, little sister.” 

The knife went into her back. 

The knife went into her back over and over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fight in The Old Guard lasts pretty much two minutes. I checked.
> 
> I want to make it clear that Erik didn’t actually need to float up and over the guards in this chapter. He could have just sent his metal shards around the corner. But he flew, because he’s dramatic like that.
> 
> Perhaps I should have used a more famous X-Woman as a parallel to Nile, like Rogue or Jean or Kitty, but… I just like Ruth, okay? She doesn’t get enough attention. And anyone who knows my fics knows that if I’m writing David Haller, then I’m going to do my best to write Ruth as well. I also knew that her precognitive abilities would come in useful for later plot.
> 
> And I couldn’t figure out a way to have Charles be a paraplegic in this, so I wanted to include another canon disabled mutant, in this case a blind person.


	3. Chapter 3

The train wasn’t meant for carrying passengers, but it had passengers nonetheless. 

In an empty car, the four of them sat and rested and contemplated the mess they were in. 

Moira had spent the last hour staring at the same patch of wall, so she turned to look at Erik and Charles, both asleep, Erik’s arm wrapped around Charles’ body. The show of protection was deceptive; if the two were woken unexpectedly, Charles would likely be the first to get his hands on a gun. What looked like Erik holding Charles and protecting him from the world was in fact more than that. It was Charles putting himself between Erik and anything that might dare wake them up. 

In all her years, Moira had never had something last that long – a relationship with a fellow immortal. There had been lovers, certainly. Sean had been such a kind, caring man. She’d left him when he hit his fifties, the two of them deciding to separate before someone asked them a question that they couldn’t give the answer to. 

Logan, meanwhile, was slumped against some crates. It couldn’t be comfortable, but the man could and would sleep anywhere. 

The train rocked gently, and she began to doze. 

*

A young woman lying in a pool of blood. 

A pile of letters on a doormat, speckled with drops of red. 

A cruel laugh. 

The four in the train car began to twitch in their sleep, all of them dreaming the exact same dream. 

The slam of a blade into an unprotected back, and they jerked awake. 

Logan took a gulp from his hip flask. 

On the other side of the world, Ruth Aldine woke up in hospital. 

*

Moira put her head in her hands, gasping. “Another one? God, not now.” 

Logan took another sip. 

Erik had already brought out a notepad and started to sketch, with Charles occasionally helping with details. 

“What did you see?” Erik asked Logan. 

“Saw a section of mail. I think I know her address and her surname.” 

“Yes,” said Erik. “First name ended in an ‘h’, and her surname was Aldine. A-L-D-I-N-E.” 

“Letters on the doormat,” said Charles, before he rattled off the woman’s address and Erik noted it down. 

“The knife that got her only had a blade on one side, and it wasn’t that sharp,” Charles added, “At a guess I’d say a kitchen knife, nothing special.” 

“Texas,” said Moira, shaking her head, wishing that she couldn’t believe what she’d seen. “It’s been over a hundred and fifty years… And now? Why did it have to happen now?” 

“There’s a reason,” Charles said softly. “There’s always a reason, we just haven’t got it figured out yet.” 

Moira sighed. 

“We need to find her,” said Erik. 

“No, no way,” Logan replied. “We have a plan, we should stick to it. We go after McCoy.” 

“And leave her on her own?” 

“We’re the ones in danger right now. We’re exposed.” 

“Not the way she is,” Charles interrupted. “Don’t pretend that you don’t remember what it was like, dying the first time and not staying dead. She’ll be confused and scared. We can’t leave her out there alone.” 

Moira closed her eyes for a few moments, silently accepting. “I’ll get her.” 

“Seriously?” said Logan. 

“She’ll be dreaming about us as well. If someone finds her, she’d be able to lead them to us.” 

“And what about us?” Logan still didn’t look happy. 

“Use the Paris safehouse, we’ll meet you there. Find McCoy.” 

Erik’s sketch done, he handed it to Moira. “I didn’t see her eyes so I don’t know what colour they’ll be, but her hair was brown or black.” 

Moira examined the sketch. The woman was in her mid-twenties at the oldest. “Christ, she’s just a kid.” She folded the paper, slipped it into a pocket, opened the door of the train car, and jumped. 

*

Stryker was unimpressed with Hank’s video. “I need proof, McCoy. Blood. Bone. DNA.” 

“I couldn’t get an uncontaminated sample from the site, I’m afraid. But the footage –” 

“Will not give me the information I need. He –” at this, Stryker pointed to Dr Essex, calm and collected in a white coat, “needs to know how they do that. And that won’t happen unless you can get us an actual, genuine sample. I want all of them.” 

Hank sat back in his chair, uneasy. “I – I think I might be able to get you one.” 

“No. All four.” 

*

The house was a cheap-looking bungalow in a part of Texas that nobody cared about. Moira knocked on the front door. 

The girl who answered it was slight and dark-haired. She wore jeans, a loose t-shirt with a design of a blue-skinned man on it, and a white blindfold which seemed to do nothing to impair her vision. “I knew you’d come, yes.” She said, stepping back to let Moira in. “I put – sorry – a pot of coffee on, if you want some.” 

Ruth Aldine lived alone. She set two mugs on the table, and Moira sipped one of them. “How did you know I’d come?” 

“I had a vision.” 

“You mean a dream,” said Moira. “You would have dreamed about me, and others.” 

“No – pardon, sorry – I had the dream, and then I had a vision. I see the future sometimes. I can’t really decide when, but I saw you coming to visit me, please.” 

Precognition. It was a mutation that nobody on Moira’s team had and it was bound to come in useful. The girl might be timid, but behind that stammer was potential. “So, Miss Aldine – Ruth. You have an older brother, Luca, a violent offender who killed your mother and got locked up for it. Then one day he breaks out of jail, breaks into your house and… and then things get confusing. You’re found in a pool of blood, the back of your shirt in tatters, suffering from symptoms of blood loss but not a mark on your body. When he’s tracked down some time later, he claims that he’s killed you, and he’s got a bloodstained kitchen knife to prove it. The police fill him full of bullets, and you’re taken to hospital, where they find that you don’t actually need a blood transfusion at all. Don’t you have questions?” 

Ruth cupped her mug in her hands but didn’t drink. “I died. I know that I died. So – no no no – the only explanation would be that I have a healing muatation, thank you. Except that I’ve had all my powers from birth, so this must be new… and the dreams, the dreams I had of you, they don’t feel like precognition.” 

Moira leaned forward in her chair. “Do you trust me, Ruth? If I say that something’s true, even if it sounds crazy, would you believe me?” 

Even blindfolded, the girl’s gaze felt direct. “I’m a telepath – sorry – I’ll know if you lie.” 

Another telepath. Charles would like that. “I lead a group of immortals. The rest are mutants, but I am – or at least, I was - human. There’s no pattern to it that we can see, but every so often, someone dies, and they come back to life. They get a healing ability. They don’t age. And after the first time they die, they start to dream about the other immortals out there. We dream about each other until we find each other. Now, my group dreamt about you. You’re one of us. You won’t age and you won’t die. The older you get, the faster injuries will heal. That’s your life now.” 

She paused. “There are some – people – after me and my crew. They’d probably be after you too if they knew about you. I won’t force you, but I think the safest thing would be for you to join us. It would mean a life without any roots, never stopping for long enough for people to see that you don’t age, no permanent home. But you wouldn’t be alone. Everyone else around you will age and die, but we won’t. I can’t promise you an easy life, but I can promise you a group of people who’ve already gone through what you’re going through. People who will understand you. Protect you. Our group is dedicated to fighting for what we think is right. Will you come with me?” 

Ruth took a sip of her coffee. “Yes,” she said quietly. 

“You’re sure?” it felt too easy. 

Ruth swallowed, nervous. “When my brother attacked me, I was – I was wearing sunglasses, pardon, yes. But they fell off when he stabbed me, and when the ambulance arrived, they saw…” Slowly, she reached up and pulled off her blindfold. Underneath it she had no eyes. Just a shallow indent below each eyebrow. “People know – please – that I’m a mutant now. It’s not safe for me anymore. I’ve got hardly any family, no boyfriend, no job because nobody wants to hire someone who looks like me. No, Texas isn’t safe for mutants. There’s nothing to keep me here.” 

“You don’t have eyes,” Moira breathed. “Then – how do you see?” 

“I – I have telekinesis, telepathy, and – thank you – precognition. I don’t see in the traditional sense, but it’s enough to get by.” 

Moira nodded, stood. They’d have to work to conceal that – such a unique physical mutation would make Ruth vulnerable to identification – but she was sure they’d think of something. “Okay. You should get packing.” 

*

They flew to Europe in the back of a small plane carrying all kinds of contraband. Ruth was silent for a long time, before she asked, “Do we really never die?” 

Moira shrugged philosophically. “Sometimes we do die. We don’t know why it stops any more than why it starts, but one day one of us gets hurt and our injuries stop healing. I knew this man, Hercules –” 

Ruth looked incredulous. “Wait, as in, _Hercules_ , Hercules?” 

“Yeah. Well, anyway, back in nineteen seventeen, Herc took a bullet to the chest like he’d done a dozen times before, only it didn’t heal up. He died like any other man. So maybe this isn’t forever for you, but healing doesn’t tend to stop until you’re old. Very old.” 

“How old are you, sorry?” 

“I was born in Scotland. I – I don’t know how long ago. I remember them building Hadrian’s Wall, so before that I guess…” Moira trailed off. In truth, she could remember. She was three thousand three hundred and sixty-four. But she didn’t need to tell Ruth that. No need to scare her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Judging from that sketch of Shaw in XMFC, Erik’s a pretty good artist, so he does the drawing here.
> 
> Ruth’s abusive older brother Luca is comic book canon. Ruth’s love of Watchmen comics is also comic canon. That’s a Doctor Manhattan t-shirt she’s wearing.
> 
> In the movie, Nile is very reluctant to join Andy, but Ruth’s ability to see the future means that she’s prepared and ready for whatever upheaval Moira will bring to her life.
> 
> Hercules is both a mythological figure and a Marvel comics character, so he gets to be the dead immortal here. He was older than Moira by a couple thousand years.
> 
> I never really got into the Moira/Sean ship, but I also don’t mind it, so Sean takes the role of Andy’s lover Achilles here.
> 
> Also, Stryker is Merrick, because they’re both arseholes.


	4. Chapter 4

Moira’s safe house was an abandoned church outside Paris, left to dust and weeds. The two women picked their way through the graveyard. 

Inside, Ruth met the three others: Charles, Erik, and Logan. Charles was friendly and welcoming, the other two more standoffish, but at least nobody was judging her for the blindfold. 

Erik fixed up a meal, and the five of them ate. 

Ruth was still reeling somewhat. Luca’s attack followed by the discovery of her own immortality was a cocktail that she was struggling to digest, but she had not choice in the matter. This was her life now. Sitting in the basement of an abandoned church with nothing of her old life left but a locket with a picture of her aunt and grandmother in it. 

Charles kept looking over at her. “It’s been so long since we had someone new.” 

Ruth finished her bite of food before she replied. “Really? Please – when was the last?”

“Me,” said Logan. “Took the others ages to find me. That was what – late eighteen sixty-four? Sixty-five? Something like that.” 

“Eighteen sixty-four?” said Ruth, knowing but still struggling to accept. 

“Yeah, I’m the youngest.” 

She looked around at the others. “And you’re all even older than him, thank you?” 

Erik finished his meal and wiped his hands clean on a napkin. “I met Charles in the crusades. We killed each other. Then we killed each other again. We killed each other a lot. It went on for days, as I recall.” 

“Until,” continued Charles, “I put down my sword and offered him my hand.” 

“Don’t act like it was a perfect moment,” said Erik gruffly. “There was still a knife sticking out of me at the time.” 

Ruth had to suppress a smile. 

“Your own knife, as I recall,” said Charles, gently bickering. 

“Yes, you stole it off me and stabbed me with it.” 

“Well, if you hadn’t tried to decapitate me then maybe I wouldn’t have stabbed you…” 

*

Ruth woke gasping and thrashing. The others in the bedroom were awake seconds after her. Both Charles and Logan had pulled out guns. 

“The fuck happened?” said Logan. 

Moira was looking at her with concern. 

“I – I had a nightmare,” Ruth admitted, feeling childish. 

“Tell us about it,” said Charles softly. 

“I – sorry, sorry – saw bits of it before when I dreamed about you, but this time I saw more. I – I saw a boy locked in an iron box at the bottom of the sea.” Charles froze. “He would drown, and then he’d – yes – come back to life. Then he’d drown again. He’d hammer his fists against the inside of the coffin. Please – it was like he was terrified, but also really, really furious. He wouldn’t stop fighting, but he – he couldn’t stop drowning…” Ruth trailed off. Like the other dreams, it had felt terrifyingly real, the cold water all around, and the boy trapped in the box. 

“His name was David,” Erik said softly. “He was one of us, but we realised too late to save him. In the early thirteen hundreds, Charles and Moira and Hercules and I were passing through a town in France. We met a woman named Gabrielle. She wanted a child desperately, but her husband hadn’t been able to give her one. With my permission, Charles… helped her. She had a son, David. Her husband was aware of the situation, and he let us visit when we could. David grew up. And then… I don’t know how well you know your history, but in the mid fourteenth century, the Black Plague swept Europe, and one of the leading beliefs was that it was caused by Jews poisoning the wells. 

“Gabrielle was away at the time, so she survived, but David and his stepfather Daniel… Daniel was a doctor, and smart enough that he’d managed to keep himself and David free of the plague. The townspeople knew that the family was Jewish, and David had always been viewed as odd. He was autistic. We didn’t have a word for it back then, but we do now. Anyway, it didn’t take long for them to place blame. The townsfolk broke into their home and cut Daniel and David to pieces, and David didn’t die. Then they hanged him, and he didn’t die. They suspected witchcraft – he had eyes that were different colours, and they took it for a witch’s mark – so they burned him alive, and he didn’t die. So then they locked him in an iron coffin, loaded him onto a ship, and threw him in the sea. We didn’t find out until months later. That was the problem with the dreams; we only have them about new immortals that we haven’t met yet. We’d all already met David, so we didn’t know what he was going through until it was too late.” 

Erik paused, and Moira took over. “We spent decades looking for him. Tracked down everyone who so much as breathed near the ship he’d been on. But eventually, we had to give up. Wherever he was in the ocean was so deep down that Charles’ telepathy couldn’t find him. We didn’t even know that he was still alive until we met Logan, and he started dreaming about David.” 

“How did he seem?” asked Charles quietly. 

Ruth opened her mouth to reply, but Erik spoke first. “Are you sure you want to know, Charles?” 

“He’s my son, I have a right to know.” There was something raw and desperate in Charles’ voice that Ruth hadn’t heard before. 

“His mind felt… frantic,” she said, wishing that she had something even approaching good news. “Sort of – pardon – splintered. But he was still fighting. That’s good, right? If he’s still fighting?” 

_You don’t have to sugar-coat it for me,_ Charles said to Ruth telepathically. _I know that after seven centuries in a box, my son is likely insane. But I can’t give up on him. Do you understand, Ruth? I cannot give up on him._

*

Wake. Scream. Drown. Die. 

Wake. Scream. Drown. Die. 

Wake. Scream. Drown. Die. 

The young man in the box at the bottom of the ocean didn’t know how long he’d been down there. He didn’t know how many times he’d drowned. All he knew was the cold oppression of the water above him, inside him, inside his lungs, the way the rusted iron of the box cut his fists when he pounded on the inside of the lid, and the familiar sensation of drowning. 

Little did he know that while he screamed and fought and drowned and died, his genetics had been hard at work trying to break him out. Mutations upon mutations. He was the most powerful mutant on the planet, and he was completely ignorant of that fact. 

If David Haller had been able to manage even a single second of mental clarity, he could have ripped the box apart with super strength, or opened it with telekinesis, or simply teleported to safety. But his mind hadn’t been clear in nearly seven hundred years, so he stayed in the box at the bottom of the ocean, pounding his fists on the inside as he’d done a million times before. 

Wake. 

Scream. 

Drown. 

Die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So David is Quynh. In the comics, Quynh (there called Noriko) and Andy were lovers, so obviously Andy losing Quynh/Noriko was awful. I figured the only thing that would hurt as much was for Charles to lose his son. Also, because it’s heavily implied that Quynh’s trauma has driven her insane, I wanted her parallel to be with a canonically mentally ill mutant, hence David.
> 
> Sadly, the persecution of Jewish people during the Black Death is historical fact. Jewish people were ostracised by society, so they didn’t mix with people as much, so they were less likely to get ill, and people used their health as an excuse to blame and persecute.
> 
> Logan’s powers came to him when he died fighting for the Union at Gettysburg in 1863, but the others didn’t find him until 1864/5 because they were in Europe at the time and transatlantic travel took a while back then.
> 
> Marvel artists keep forgetting that David Haller has heterochromia (one green eye, one blue) but I haven’t and I’m petty about it.
> 
> Charles offering a truce to Erik while Erik still has a knife in him is straight from the Old Guard comics, where Joe offers his hand to Nicky while Nicky has a knife sticking out of his back. Ah, love…


	5. Chapter 5

After her nightmare, Ruth needed air. 

She couldn’t bear the idea of David, trapped forever at the bottom of the ocean. An eternity of torture, no end in sight. 

Ruth ended up at the far end of the graveyard under a tree, bouncing on the balls of her feet in an attempt to relieve the stress. 

After a few moments of solitude, Moira joined her. 

“I know – yes yes yes – I have to live with this,” Ruth whispered to her. “I know I do. But that doesn’t make it easy. I didn’t have a choice.” 

“I know,” said Moira, echoing the younger woman. “It was never going to be easy. And I know it’s probably only a small consolation that me and the others will keep you safe. Train you until you can keep yourself safe. The five of us will only have each other for – for the future, however long that future might be.” 

Ruth was about to reply when there was a thud from inside the church. They both crouched instinctively, and Moira pulled out a gun. Of course she had a gun with her. 

Ruth had no weapon, but her telekinesis left her far from defenceless. She just hoped that there wouldn’t be any hand-to-hand combat. 

_There are people breaking into the church, but I can’t properly feel their minds,_ she whispered to Moira telepathically. 

“They found us,” Moira whispered back. 

By the time they were in the church’s basement, Ruth knew that something was wrong. The muffled, telepathically blocked minds of the attackers weren’t present in the basement, but neither were Charles or Erik’s thoughts. Logan’s mind was harder to read, but Ruth found him all the same, sprawled in an armchair, a huge wound in his torso. 

“Charles?” Moira called, “Erik?” 

“I think they’re gone,” said Ruth. “I can’t sense their minds.” She walked closer to Logan. Up close, the damage looked even worse. “Shit.” 

Moira knelt by Logan and took him by the shoulders. “Come on, Logan. Wake up. Come on. We’re both still in this shithole of a situation. You don’t get out of it that easily, now wake up.” 

Silence for long enough that Ruth started to worry, but then Logan grunted with pain and sat up straighter, leaned forward, groaned. 

Moira let go of him and backed up a little. “Welcome back.” 

Logan leaned back again. “Fuck, I hate gut shots.” 

“How many were there?” 

“Not sure.” 

“Where are Charles and Erik?” 

“I don’t know. I – I turned on the TV, then they broke down the door. Grenade took me out, and then…” 

Moira straightened. “McCoy’s people will know that they didn’t get all of us. They’ll come back.” 

“I can feel some shielded minds, sorry” said Ruth. “They’re going into the church above us.” 

Moira nodded, turned, grabbed a sword from a pile of weapons by the door. “Okay, I’ll clear them out. Wait for a signal.” 

*

The soldiers filing into the church were armed and armoured, spreading out through the nave and up towards the north and south transepts. Moira watched them unseen from up in the gallery. She took a moment to collect herself, to form a plan in her mind of the way she wanted the fight to go, and then she jumped. 

Sword in her right hand, gun in her left. Slashes interspersed with shots, and every bullet took a soldier in the head. A knife scraped across her right shoulder blade and she spun away from her attacker, shot two men, opened a third’s chest with her sword, then she was back facing the man with the knife. A swipe of her sword took his hand; a gunshot to the head finished him off. Two more cuts of her blade, a thrust, and she’d cleared herself a small breathing space. 

Then the second wave was upon her. The fight passed in a blur of her blade and her gun, until there was a pile of bodies around her and she’d put a bullet in the last man’s skull. 

Meanwhile, Logan was packing a bag. Ruth’s bag was pretty much already packed from when she’d arrived last night, so it was left to her to stand in the middle of the main basement room and fret. 

“How are we supposed to - pardon \- know what the signal is?” 

“Wait for it,” said Logan calmly. 

About a minute later, an explosion rocked the whole building. 

Logan nodded. “There it is.” 

They left the basement, were up the stairs and outside before Ruth could properly process what had just happened. 

Moira was waiting for them by a car. They were inside – Moira driving, Logan riding shotgun, and Ruth in the back – and as Moira drove off, the church slowly began to succumb to flames. 

*

Erik could tell from the taste at the back of his throat that they’d used knockout gas. His hands were zip-tied in front of him, and a suppression collar was heavy at his throat. 

He took stock of his surroundings. He was sitting on the floor of an armoured truck, surrounded by half a dozen guards. Charles was slumped before him, also wearing a heavy suppression collar. He wasn’t moving. Unconscious, or was this his final death? 

“Charles?” 

One of the guards kicked him. “No talking.” 

“Charles, aufwachen, aufwachen.” 

“Quiet!” said the guard, again. 

Erik fixed the man with a glare. “What will you do? Kill me? My healing powers don’t come from mutation. This collar won’t stop me from surviving whatever you put me through.” 

He leaned down to Charles again. “Charles, aufwachen, réveille-toi.” 

“I’m awake,” Charles muttered. “Where are we?” 

“Armoured van. They used knockout gas.” 

That same guard was still taking issue with their conversation. “I told you to shut up!” 

“I need to know that he’s alright,” said Erik. 

“Cute,” said the guard. “He your boyfriend or something?” Some of the other guards sniggered, and Erik was sick of their shit. 

“Child,” Erik spat. “Infant. Mocking something because it’s your only way of confronting what you are unable to comprehend. This man is more to me than you could possibly dream. He’s the north star that guides me at night and warmth in the depths of winter. His kiss still thrills me after a thousand years. His heart overflows with kindness that this world will never be worthy of and I love him beyond all measure. He’s not my boyfriend. He is everything and more.” 

Charles had sat up, had been watching Erik’s speech. He sighed, shook his head, smiled, and said, “You incurable bloody romantic,” and then they were kissing. 

Erik had meant what he’d said about Charles’ kiss. His world shrank to the sensation of Charles’s lips. He turned his head, deepened the kiss, drank his lover in with danger all around. They could have stayed like that for hours. 

Rough hands pulled them apart. 

*

When the armoured van pulled up next to a private jet and its back was opened, the guards by the plane found six dead humans and two mutants looking entirely too pleased with themselves. 

“Don’t supposed any of you chaps would be willing to get these control collars off us?” asked Charles, defiant amusement sparkling in his blue eyes. He had always been the best at remaining calm at gunpoint. 

They were hauled out of the van, and found themselves face-to-face with Hank McCoy. 

As Charles was roughly hauled aboard the jet, Erik spat on McCoy’s shoe. “I hope they paid you a lot of money for your betrayal. Enough for you to learn how to live with yourself, knowing what you’ve done.” He looked up at the jet. “Though it is a nice plane.” 

“There’s a television!” called Charles from inside the plane. 

“Is there champagne?” Erik called as they pushed him up the steps into the plane, closely followed by McCoy. 

*

Moira’s next safe house was an abandoned mine in the middle of nowhere in the French countryside, filled with bits and pieces that she’d picked up over the centuries. 

Ruth was just glad that it was sheltered. In the last few hours she’d become hyper-aware of her lack of combat training. There was no way she’d be able to learn everything she needed to survive the situation she’d found herself in, except, of course, that she likely wouldn’t be dying for at least the next couple of millennia. 

Moira and Logan got a fire started, then Logan retired to sit with a laptop, looking for McCoy. 

*

“Welcome, gentlemen.” 

Erik didn’t like the look of William Stryker. The man’s face was just begging for a punch. He didn’t like the office he was in any more than he liked the man it belonged to: right at the top of a skyscraper, full of shitty modern art and a pretentious display of medals that Stryker had won in some war. 

Styker smiled at them both. “I’m sure you can guess what this is about. You two have some very special genetic code inside of you, and I’ve got scientists that can use it to do extraordinary things.” He took a step towards Erik, and Erik slammed his head into Stryker’s nose. He got a fist to the ribs as punishment, but it was worth it to watch Stryker reel in pain. 

“I watched the video of your… particular abilities,” said Stryker once he’d recovered, “But I think I’d like an in-person demonstration.” He picked up a letter opener from his desk and punched it in between Erik’s ribs, then did it again three more times for good measure. 

Erik gritted his teeth against the pain. Behind him, he heard Charles struggling against their captors. 

A doctor in a lab coat leaned in to watch Erik’s wounds heal. “Well,” said Dr Essex, “that’s my Nobel Prize right there.” 

After the healing was over, Erik found himself kneeling next to Charles. They pressed their heads together briefly, but then Erik saw Essex come forward with a pair of syringes. He’d barely begun to resist when a taser caught him in the back and a syringe plunged into his neck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here Dr Kozak is paralleled by Dr Essex, who’s always there when you need to write a doctor from the X-Men comics with questionable morals.
> 
> And Erik’s dramatic romance speech, because I hear that Joe and Nicky invented romance, but I also hear that Charles and Erik invented romance.
> 
> When Erik’s talking to Charles in other languages, he’s saying ‘wake up’ in German and then in French.


	6. Chapter 6

Logan had been working for hours and had made little progress. 

Moira could feel herself getting impatient, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Computers still confused her in their speed and complexity, so instead she sat in the corner of the room and waited. 

Pain twinged in her shoulder. Reflexively, she rubbed it. Her hand came away slick with blood. 

The knife. The knife, back in the church, scraping across her shoulder. 

Moira stood and turned her back on the others, looked at the blood on her hand. It looked nearly black in the half-light from the fire. 

So this was it. This was the day that the _whatever it was_ that made her immortal decided to leave. She didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. 

But the first thing she needed to do was conceal it. Crossing the room to a large chest, she pulled out a jacket that would do the job. Moira knew a little about how to hide her thoughts from a telepath, so she made sure to keep thinking of other things, not the blood on her hand, not her bleeding shoulder. The last thing she needed was to scare Ruth. 

“I’m going out for a walk,” she said as she walked to the exit. 

“You okay, Moira?” said Logan. 

Had he smelled the blood? No, she already had blood on her from the men she’d killed at the church. More wouldn’t make a difference. He must have been alerted by her pounding heart. “I’m fine, Logan.” 

*

At the pharmacy, Moira was struck by how little she knew of healing wounds. She knew some first aid, but it didn’t seem like enough in the face of all the bottles and boxes. 

She put some antiseptic wipes, gauze, medical tape, and sterile pads in her shopping basket, then covered it up with a few nutrition bars, feeling illogically guilty. Nobody in the shop would think strangely of a woman buying what she was buying, and yet… 

Back in the car she winced as she applied the antiseptic, then had to twist awkwardly to get herself bandaged up, but in the end she was pretty sure that she’d done a good job. 

Once this was over, _if_ she survived it, she’d find a way to tell the others. But only once this was over. 

She remembered Hercules, dead in a trench in the Great War. He’d looked so relieved to feel himself die, even as Logan wept and Charles and Erik panicked, unable to accept what they saw. Moira had accepted it, acknowledged it, spent the next hundred years almost wishing for it. She’d lived so long. Too long. And now the end was staring her in the face. If not now, sometimes in the next fifty, sixty years or so. Moira of Clan Kinross had gained an expiry date. 

*

Hank McCoy watched the two men, strapped down and restrained in Stryker’s lab. 

“How long will you hold them for?” 

“Until I get what I want,” said Stryker. “Until I can replicate this and sell it to the highest bidder. Highest human bidder, that is. I’m not letting muties anywhere near this. And not even then. The last thing I need is for one of my competitors to find them and make their own immortality serum. Think of it this way, McCoy: two fewer mutants on the streets.” 

*

Charles shook and cried out with pain as Essex plunged a needle deep into his right lung. “Oh, you are fascinating,” said Essex as he pulled the needle out. “This is going to change the world.” 

Charles sighed. “That attempt at justification… I’ve heard it over and over and over again from people like you. It doesn’t make you any less immoral.” 

As Essex walked away, Erik came to, fighting against the restraints for long enough to figure out that he couldn’t break free of them. 

“You know how much I like watching you sleep,” said Charles, “But I am glad that you’ve finally woken up.” 

Erik’s response was swear words in five different languages until he was calm enough for rational conversation. 

“I can’t break free, Charles.” 

“We’ll get there, darling.” A moment of silence. “Do you remember Paris?” 

“Which time in Paris?” 

Charles looked at Erik and smirked. 

“Oh, _that_ time.” 

*

Logan had finally found something; McCoy was holed up just outside New York. 

Another plane ride, a car journey, and they were pulling into a field, a walking distance from McCoy’s house. 

Logan opened the boot, took out a pistol, handed it to Moira. She wouldn’t bother using her axe for something like this. He loaded his own gun, then stood back as Moira offered a machine gun to Ruth. 

Ruth handed it back. “I – I don’t know how to shoot. Sorry sorry sorry – I’ve never done anything like this before.” 

Moira considered this, then took the machine gun back and handed Ruth the pistol. “Then stay with the car and take this. Just in case there’s trouble.” 

Moira and Logan walked off to deal with McCoy, and Ruth stood in the field, holding the gun. 

She didn’t like leaving them to do this without her. Her powerful understanding of the ways of the future meant that even without a specific vision to guide her, she knew that the rest of her life belonged with these people. It was one of the reasons why she hadn’t complained about her new way of living. 

It was better that she stay behind. She’d learn to be a warrior one day, but today wasn’t it. 

The gun felt unnatural in her hand. Ruth held it gingerly, touching every part except the trigger. She must have flicked something wrong, because the magazine fell out. Ruth stretched out her hand and it rose off the ground, telekinetically floating high enough for her to pick it out of the air. 

It was empty. 

The gun that Logan had inspected and handed to Moira. Was empty. 

Logan. Logan whose mind was harder to read than an ordinary person’s because of some quirk of mutation. Logan who’d spent _so long_ looking for McCoy and finding nothing, only to suddenly turn around and say that he had the man’s home address. 

Ruth dropped the useless gun in the grass. Reaching out with her right hand, she focused until she held a psychic blade. Three and a half feet of glowing white energy, telepathy and telekinesis combined. She turned in the direction that Moira and Logan had headed and ran. 

*

McCoy’s house was large, and the study was in proportion. 

He’d certainly been busy. One wall was covered in photos and historical references to Moira and her team. Hell, he’d even managed to find copies of hers and Charles’ doctorates from the sixties. 

The man himself was standing in front of his wall of information, looking too calm for Moira’s taste. 

“Moira of Clan Kinross. The Immortal Warrior. Is it true that you met Boudica?” 

Moira raised her gun. “Charles and Erik. Their location, now.” 

A white hot pain took her in the side. She crumpled, dropped her gun, held her side, but Logan was behind her, pinning her arms. 

_No no no NO._

“Logan what the fuck are you doing?” she bucked in his grip. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” He zip-tied her hands behind her back and she screamed from rage and pain in equal measure. He’d betrayed them. He’d set them up. He’d been working with McCoy all along. 

McCoy sounded respectful, almost apologetic. “Please don’t resist, Dr Mactaggert. The things you could do, for science, for the world…” 

Moira’s response was to groan and roll onto her side. Now that she was restrained, Logan had backed off. After all, she had no mutation to threaten him with. She looked up at him. “Why, Logan? Why the hell would you do any of this?” 

Logan swallowed. His voice was thick with the grief of a century. “If – if they can find out why we keep living, then they might find a way for us to die. I can’t keep going on like this, Moira. And I know you want it to end too.” 

She shook her head. “It already has. I lost it, Logan. I’m not healing anymore. It stopped at the church.” 

“What the –” he crouched beside her, felt the blood at her side. “Fuck, you’re still bleeding, you’re not healing.” He turned to McCoy. “Get help! Go!” 

McCoy returned with a cloth which he pressed to the wound. 

Solders started to file into the room. Logan stood back and let them restrain him as well. 

“You can let her go,” he told the mercenaries, “She’s not healing any more, her immortality’s gone.” 

“On the contrary,” said a man standing at the back of the room. “Finding out why the healing has stopped will be one of our main priorities.” 

“No,” said Logan, “No, no, let her go. Let her fucking go!” 

But he was already restrained; there was nothing he could do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we have Logan’s betrayal. I’ll delve deeper into his reasons why in the next chapter, but for now let’s just say that he’s very, very depressed about the concept of living indefinitely.
> 
> In the movie, Nile stays with the car because she’s uncomfortable with her situation. Here, Ruth has a different reason: she’s a civilian with no combat training. She doesn’t use a gun because she doesn’t know how and there’s no time to teach her properly.
> 
> And a Paris reference, because why shouldn’t I reference DOFP in this?


	7. Chapter 7

Moira sat in the lab and seethed while they stitched her up. 

Just as Stryker was leaving, Charles said frankly, “Everything dies in the end, Stryker. Everything. Even if you did make some kind of serum from us, I doubt it will last forever. We aren’t built for eternity. We just last longer than most.” 

Stryker ignored him, though Moira could tell from the set of the man’s jaw that Charles had successfully pissed him off. 

Not for the first time, Moira pondered the fact that, if Erik weren’t around, she would definitely have taken Charles to bed by now. Probably not for romantic love, but definitely for the sake of spending a night with someone she respected. 

Once Stryker was gone, the others turned on Logan. 

“Why the ever-loving fuck did you do this?” snarled Erik. “The second I’m out of this collar, I’m going to shred your bones with razors.” 

Charles’ attack was simpler. “Why the fuck would you do this, Logan?” 

Logan was in the same situation as the rest of them: restrained. Unlike Moira, he wasn’t suffering from a bullet wound, but somehow he managed to look like he was in the worst state of all of them. 

He was silent for a long time, until, “Hercules,” he choked. “He – he died in my arms. The love of my life died in my arms, and what? I’m just supposed to live with that? Spend the rest of fucking forever without him? We had fifty years together. Fifty years is jack shit to people like us. I – how long until I start to forget him? I don’t want to forget him, and I don’t want to keep living like this. I’m sorry, look, I’m really fucking sorry. But you clearly want an explanation and that’s it. You don’t know what it’s like, Erik. Maybe if you were like me – if Charles was gone, if you watched a kid drowning every time you went to sleep – maybe then you’d understand, and you’d want mortality too.” 

Erik opened his mouth to launch into a tirade, but Charles got there first, his voice filled with seven centuries of grief. “Logan, you have no idea what I would give, to dream what you dream every night. You get to see my son every time you go to sleep, but I?” He laughed harshly. “I can barely remember David’s face. And even if I did lose Erik, and even if I watched David drowning every night, I wouldn’t want mortality. Because while I live, there’s a chance that I might see my son again one day. While I live, I can keep saving people. Make the world a better place. Think on that, Logan. Think on that while they torture us.” 

*

The man sitting in the study had his head in his hands. He looked up at her, standing in the doorway, her psychic blade blazing in her hand. 

She didn’t ask him any questions. She just read his mind, not even bothering to do it subtly. 

“I’m taking your car,” she told him, anger meaning that she didn’t stammer for once. “I’m going to break them out of Stryker’s lab.” 

“You’re one of them?” 

“Yes. I’m new.” 

His eyes were wide and scared. Ruth had no idea if anyone had ever been afraid of her before. She was the blind girl, the girl who stammered. But not today. Today she was the woman with a sword in her hand, and McCoy knew it. “I – I didn’t realise what it would mean. I swear, I never – I never thought he would torture them. Stryker only cares about their immortality, not what they did with it.” He pointed to the board behind him. “Look, I’ve got it all: names, dates… All those people they saved. And then their children, or their children’s children, do extraordinary things. They find new vaccines, they write the code that put humans on the moon, they fight for civil rights… I think that’s why you people live so long. The lives you save benefit humanity exponentially. But Stryker doesn’t care about any of it. I thought he’d let them go eventually, but he isn’t going to. I thought what I was doing was right. The end of disease! But if the other immortals aren’t released, God knows what the world will be like without them out there saving lives.” 

Ruth stepped closer to the board. She hadn’t been with Moira’s team long, but her telepathy had told her enough. She’d felt Moira’s depression, the desperate horror in her belief that in her long, long life, she had failed at her one goal of making the world a better place. But she’d been wrong. Moira and the others, they’d done so much for the world. They just didn’t know it. 

“You knew all this, yes,” said Ruth, something half-savage in her voice, “And you turned them over anyway.” 

“I’m sorry,” said McCoy, and Ruth knew that he genuinely was. “I thought that once Stryker let them go they could go back to it, but he won’t, and Moira’s not healing anymore.” 

Ice at the base of her spine. “She’s _what_?” 

He shook his head apologetically. “She got shot and she didn’t heal. They took her to the lab, she should be okay, but her immortality’s gone. Look, please, I have to make this right.” 

“I don’t need your help to make this right,” said Ruth as she stood over the man who’d decided he knew what was best for her friends and the wider world. “I’m taking your car, I’m driving to Styker’s base, and I’m saving my friends.” 

McCoy fumbled inside his suit jacket and came out with a small square of plastic and his car keys. “Take this too. It’s a key card from the building, to help you get in. Go in through the back entrance, there are fewer security cameras.” 

Ruth looked at him for a few moments, then the card and the keys flew into her free hand. “Fine. Thanks for that, and for nothing else.” 

She let her psychic blade dissipate and left McCoy there on his couch. 

*

The guards in Stryker’s building all wore psychic blockers, but telepathy had never been Ruth’s only weapon. She swiped her way in and took the lift up to the lab level. The doors opened, revealing three guards. 

“Stop right there,” said one of them. “How the hell did you get up here?” 

Ruth responded by crushing their hearts inside their chests. She doubted that she’d be able to do it to a moving target, but it had worked for now. Trying to come to terms with the lives she’d just taken, Ruth stepped over the bodies and headed to the main lab, adjusting Moira’s axe where it was slung over her shoulder. 

The rest of the level was free of guards, but Ruth didn’t think it would stay that way for long. She’d used her powers to destroy all the security cameras she could see, but by now Stryker definitely knew he had an intruder. 

Inside the lab, a doctor lunged for her. She impaled him on her psychic blade and undid the restraints on Moira, Charles, and Erik with a wave of her hand. 

“There are people coming, yes, sorry,” she told them. “Their minds are shielded.” 

Charles nodded in confirmation. “Four by the lift, and more on their way.” 

Moira was silent, head bowed, eyes closed. 

Ruth tried her best to look the other woman in the face. It wasn’t easy, given the fact that she couldn’t actually make eye contact with her. “Moira, I know that you’re not immortal anymore. But I’ve seen – McCoy had all this research, please, information. All the people you rescued, it _made a difference_. You have to survive this, so that you can see it for yourself.” 

Ruth had taken a gun from one of the fallen guards, and she pressed it into Moira’s hand. Moira took it, checked the safety, and stood. Four men burst into the lab and she shot them in quick succession. 

Moira walked over to where Logan still lay, restrained. “You’re coming too, Logan.” 

“Okay,” said Ruth. 

“No,” said Erik. 

“Yes,” said Charles. 

Erik shook his head. “Charles, don’t be ridiculous. He’s a traitor.” 

Moira undid Logan’s restraints. “Get up. We’ll deal with you later.” 

At first Logan just lay there, and Ruth thought he might refuse to move, but then he stood. 

Ruth handed Moira her axe, Charles, Erik, and Logan picked up guns from the fallen guards, and the five of them got ready to move out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hercules/Logan is one of my favourite niche (and canon) comic relationships.
> 
> Also a hint at Charles/Moira, because I do like their relationship, platonic or romantic.


	8. Chapter 8

The first lab they came to was empty. They moved through it, checking corners, covering each other’s blind spots. Moira and Ruth stayed near the back of the group – the new recruit and the woman who was mortal for the first time in thirty-three centuries. 

They moved into a corridor, Moira and Ruth going left while the others went right. Moira shot one of the guards, Ruth crushed the throat of another with a flick of her hand. Behind them, Charles and Erik took down two more with two shots. 

They kept moving. Moira ducked and twisted through the fight, knowing exactly when a trigger needed pulling. Charles and Erik worked together as always, picking up guns from the men they’d killed whenever they ran empty. Soon enough Erik was surrounded by a whirling cloud of spent bullets, which slid in and out of guards’ bodies at his whim. Every time Charles shot someone, the cloud’s numbers increased by one. 

And Ruth? Ruth was doing her level best to keep Moira alive, whether that meant slashing throats with her psychic blade or bending bullets around Moira’s body. She hadn’t come this far to let her mentor die. 

Another lab. Logan shot the first guard, gutted a second with his claws. Ruth took the bullet from the first man’s body and drove it between the eyes of another. 

More guards were arriving with every second. Charles body-slammed one, leaving Erik to finish him off. On the other side of the room, Moira slammed her boot into a man’s groin and shot him in the eye when he doubled over. 

A brief moment for everyone except Ruth to pick up guns and reload. 

They crouched by the doors to the next room, Moira wincing from her bullet wound, but every single one of them ready. They were about to move when the doors exploded outwards. 

Smoke grenade. They’d found the main security team. 

They fell back, coughing. Ruth managed to use her telekinesis to clear a space of relatively breathable air, and she looked around for the others, searching for them with her mind. Up ahead there were more minds, shielded and hostile. 

Someone stepped into the room, clearly assuming that the five of them were all down and blinded. 

But Ruth had been born blind, and she was ready for them. Her glowing psychic blade would give her location away, so when guards started silently slipping into the room she kept to fists and telekinesis, bullets moving with a wave of her fingers. 

By the hole where the door used to be, a man in a gas mask drove a kick into Charles’ side, ended up on his back with Charles’ fist in his face. Charles Xavier had been boxing for as long as boxing existed. Xavier drew back, coughing, and Erik took over, ripping off the gas mask and slamming the man’s head into the concrete floor. The guard managed to throw him off, put a gun in Charles’ mouth, pulled the trigger, then ran out of the door, staggering. 

Erik pulled Charles into his lap, held his hand as the other man choked his way back to life. 

They picked up fresh guns and found the others in the next room over, exchanging fire with a team of guards by the room’s other door. 

Moira ran out of bullets, slung her axe off her shoulder, and said, “I’ve had enough.” 

Logan’s gun jammed. He dumped it and let his claws slide out. “Agreed.” 

He ran at the guards, roaring, taking a dozen bullets to the chest as he slashed at the men who fell before him. Moira moved past him, into the next corridor, axe in hand. 

Ruth ran after her – God, Moira wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest, why hadn’t she thought about that before – and found Moira standing over a dead guard, blood dripping from her blade. The other soon joined them. 

“Judging from the shielded minds in the building,” said Charles, “Stryker’s somewhere on the top floor.” 

Erik nodded. “I can feel the guns up there.” 

“So how are we doing this?” said Logan, “Cuba, ‘sixty-two?” 

“No,” said Moira, “We’ll do it like Cairo ‘eighty-three.” 

“What – thank you – happened in Cairo in nineteen eighty-three?” asked Ruth. 

“Eighteen eighty-three,” said Moira with a smile, “And you’ll see.” 

*

They split up. Ruth ended up with Moira outside the locked door to Stryker’s penthouse. The older woman had gone back into the lab to pick up another gun, which she held ready. 

“We’re going to wait for the signal,” Moira told her. 

“Okay,” said Ruth, crouching by a dead guard, “But you’re putting – sorry – you need to put this on.” She started undoing the straps of the guard’s bulletproof vest. 

“Don’t bother,” said Moira. “I don’t know how to fight with armour on anymore. If it’s my time to die, then it’s my time.” 

*

A group of guards stood with their guns pointing at the door to Stryker’s penthouse. 

Silence. 

Nothing. 

“The fuck are they doing out there?” said one of the guards. 

Which was when Erik Lehnsherr floated down the side of the building, surrounded by a cloud of bullets which shattered the glass and ripped the guards apart. 

Erik recognised one of them as he stepped inside. “You shot Charles,” he told the corpse. “That was a mistake.” 

Ruth and Moira made their entrance, Moira taking shots at the guards stationed at the end of the corridor. Ruth staggered, a vision flashing through her mind. “They run out of bullets in seventeen seconds,” she told Moira, and when the men paused to reload, Moira took them out. 

Charles and Logan burst in, killed the remaining men with bullets and claws, then Charles gave a shout of alarm. “The lift’s going down! I don’t – can’t tell how many are in there. We can’t let him get away.” 

Moira was staggering with pain. Whatever painkillers they might have given her for her bullet wound were wearing off. Ruth could tell that running wasn’t an option for her right now. “You three go. I’ll stay up here – yes – with Moira.” 

With the others heading downstairs, Moira winced her way over to the window. 

“Are you alright?” said Ruth. 

“It hurts,” Moira replied softly. “That’s all.” She looked Ruth as close in the eye as anyone could manage. “I think I’ve figured out why I lost my immortality when you turned up. It was so that I could remember – remember that there are people out there worth fighting for. Worth dying for. That there’s still some good in the world. I think I know what I want to do with the rest of my life.” 

Ruth nodded, because she knew too. “You’ll be with us.” 

A snarl cut through the quiet. “You fucking bitch!” 

Ruth whirled. Stryker, wearing the fanciest telepathy-proof headset she’d ever seen. She couldn’t feel even a trace of his mind. His gun was trained on Moira. 

“Don’t either of you move, I’ll kill her I fucking swear it!” 

Ruth had had enough of killing for today. A wave of her hand and the gun flew out of Stryker’s grasp, and Moira was there, swinging her axe into his neck. 

He looked surprised as he fell. 

“Let’s take the lift down,” said Moira. 

*

At the bottom of the building, the others were waiting for them.

“Stryker?” said Erik. 

“Dealt with.” Moira replied. “Let’s go.” 

They piled into McCoy’s car. Charles drove.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cuba ’62 and Cairo ’83. I just couldn’t help making the references.


	9. Epilogue

_**London**_

The pub had stood for four hundred years and would probably stand for four hundred more; the building was listed, a mark of a modern world wanting to preserve just enough of its history to remember the way things used to be. 

Logan waited outside. The others were inside, talking. Voting. Deciding. 

After what felt like a decade but was probably only an hour, Moira came out to meet him. 

“What will it be?” he asked. “Not like you lot can kill me.” He braced himself for the worst. 

Moira nodded. “There were always going to be consequences. In exactly one hundred years from today, they’ll meet you here. But until then, you’re on your own.” 

They would meet him, but Moira wouldn’t. Logan was never going to see her again. He suspected it would take him a long time to come to terms with that. Maybe he never would. “I expected something worse,” he admitted. “An iron box, maybe.” 

Moira shook her head. “Even if we wanted to do something like that to you – which we didn’t – as long as you dream about David, he’ll be dreaming about you. We won’t give him dreams of torture.” She glanced away from him, then back. “Maybe try and give him some good dreams, okay?” 

“I wouldn’t count on it.” 

They stood side by side. Ancient. Tired. 

“I’ll miss you,” said Moira. 

Logan thought about patting here on the shoulder, making light of the statement, but in the end he went for a hug. 

When the others left the pub, they all took a last look at Logan, standing alone, before they turned their backs and walked away. 

*

**_Just outside New York_**

The four of them had been looking at Hank’s wall for a long time, taking in the photos and the places and the dates. 

“This is only for the past two centuries or so,” said Hank. “If you think about how long you’ve lived, multiply out all the good you’ve done…” 

Moira didn’t respond. 

“I think – please – I think this is why we’re immortal,” said Ruth. “I think this might be the reason.” 

Moira nodded. Maybe this was a reason. Or at least, a purpose. 

She turned to Hank. “Logan’s not the only one who needs to make amends. There are too many people out there who’d covet what we have, try to extract it and exploit it. So from now on, whenever we leave a trace of our existence, your job is to wipe it out. From now on, you keep us anonymous. And on top of that, you’ll be finding us the work that we do best.” 

“This is not a request,” said Erik. 

“Of course,” said Hank. 

*

**_Texas, Three months later_**

Ruth’s funeral had been today. She’d watched from a safe distance: her grandmother and her aunt and an empty coffin. 

Faking her death had been astonishingly easy, though perhaps that was because the people advising her had so much practice at it. Charles had been faking his death every eighty years and leaving the money to himself in his will for about the last three centuries, keeping the ‘family’ fortune intact. 

Her aunt genuinely believed she was dead, but her grandmother knew the truth and had accepted it; nothing got past Irene Adler. 

She felt strangely tired after the funeral. Emotional exhaustion, she supposed. 

In spite of the fatigue, she woke just past midnight feeling completely awake. Resigning herself to a sleepless night, she got out of bed and padded to the safe house’s kitchen to make herself some coffee. 

By the time she was standing in the kitchen doorway, Ruth realised her mistake. Still only half-awake, she hadn’t bothered to check telepathically for intruders. She hadn’t sensed that there was someone else in the house. 

The young man standing in her kitchen was barefoot, skeletal, dressed in rags. Long black hair framed a face that had looked twenty-three for the last seven hundred years. 

“I dreamed of you,” said David. 

*

**_Calais, Three years later_**

Most of the safe houses were tiny, but this one wasn’t so bad. It was old, but the kind of old that had character, and large enough that Ruth didn’t need to share a bedroom with anyone. 

There was an indent on the pillow beside her. Just because she didn’t need to share her bedroom didn’t mean that she wasn’t doing it. 

He was already awake, drying his hair in the ensuite bathroom. A minute later he stepped out, wearing sweatpants and nothing else. Over the past three years he’d managed to get himself to a place that was relatively healthy, but in spite of the added muscle tone he somehow still looked starved, slightly hollow. Perhaps he’d always look that way. 

David stepped around his longsword and Ruth’s rapier where they’d been discarded on the floor the previous night and flopped onto the bed. 

“You went swimming again, didn’t you?” asked Ruth, as gently as possible. 

He shifted slightly to look at her. “I can’t be afraid of the water forever, mon cuer. Yes, Dad will probably freak out, if and when I tell him, but I need to practice. Sooner or later we’ll have a mission where I need to swim. Dad can’t keep us in landlocked countries forever.” 

Ruth had noticed that too – how many of their missions had been away from water. Charles had almost certainly had a word with Hank about the places he wanted to keep David away from, in an attempt to avoid triggering a panic attack. Also notable had been a complete absence of any missions where they’d have to hide in an enclosed space, or, indeed, a mission that would bring David near anything that even vaguely resembled a coffin. 

She traced her fingers through his hair. He still wore it long, even though it sometimes got in his face during missions. “How did it go?” 

“I had… two, maybe three panic attacks on my way to the ocean floor. On the way back up, Cyndi took me over for about half a minute. She nearly boiled the whole English Channel, but I got myself back under control in time, and the swim to shore wasn’t so bad. I’m getting better, Ruth.” 

“Don’t push yourself too hard, okay? This kind of recovery takes time.” It wasn’t as if David could go to a therapist for that kind of trauma. His dissociative identity disorder could potentially get him locked up, let alone if he started claiming to have lived seven hundred years. But he would recover. Ruth knew him well enough to be sure of that. “Come here.” 

“Oh, anything for you.” He grinned, moved closer, kissed her long and deep, and if this was what the rest of eternity looked like, then Ruth didn’t think it would be so bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s how David escaped: his body developed a mutation where he no longer needed to breathe, which meant that he didn’t drown, so he was no longer stuck in the cycle of drowning and being revived, which gave him the moment of mental clarity he needed to escape.
> 
> I know I could have probably left things with Ruth meeting David for the first time, and it would have been a good ending that worked as a parallel to the Old Guard movie. But I wanted to make it clear that everything would be alright.
> 
> And yes, in 97 years’ time Logan is going to end up as the fifth wheel to two pairs of perpetual honeymooners.
> 
> The pub is the Seven Stars, built in 1602.
> 
> In the comics, David and Charles were in Calais when the Phoenix Force returned to Earth, so they’re in Calais for the end of this fic.
> 
> At the end of X-Men Legacy (2012), Ruth is wielding a psychic blade that looks a lot like a rapier, so I gave her a rapier as her primary melee weapon. In the same comic run, David has some metaphorical thoughts about using a longsword, so that’s his weapon of choice.
> 
> Sometimes I have reservations with immortal characters dating people significantly younger than them because of the huge discrepancy in life experience, but for David and Ruth, that problem doesn’t apply. When they first meet, David has ~23 years of life experience, followed by ~700 years of solitary confinement and torture. Ruth has ~23 years of life experience. They’re on pretty even footing.
> 
> Note that Ruth doesn’t stammer around David because she’s comfortable with him.
> 
> Cyndi is one of David’s comic canon split personalities. She controls his pyrokinesis.
> 
> ‘mon cuer’ translates from Medieval French to mean ‘my heart’. In modern French, it’s ‘mon couer’.


End file.
